Chapter 17 #2
“No. Sometimes it was only tiresome.” He looks back at me. “Women who thought my attraction to men was an experiment they could manage. Men who thought my attraction to women made me undecided. People who treated desire like a courtroom where someone had to prove jurisdiction.”
I laugh once despite myself.
He almost smiles.
“Sorry,” he says. “Law school has damaged me.”
“No, that was good.” I lean back, studying him. “Accurate too.”
His gaze moves over my face. “You understand.”
“I do.”
“Because you’re bisexual too.”
“Yes.” I pause. “And because I’ve had the same conversations with different vocabulary.”
Halston’s shoulders lower a fraction.
There. That is the thing I want. Not surrender. Not relief exactly. Just the moment a man realizes he may not have to explain every injury before someone believes it happened.
“My parents were good about it,” I say. “When I told them. They loved me before. They loved me after. My father’s concern was never whether I loved a man or a woman. It was whether the world would use either one to take something from me.”
“The career.”
“The career. The press. The room I wasn’t in when people decided what version of me was easiest to sell.”
Halston listens with his whole body. Still, but not distant. His eyes on mine. One hand wrapped around the stem of his flute. The other resting on the table, fingers relaxed, though not as relaxed as he wants me to think.
“So you know,” he says.
“I know.”
A beat passes.
Then, I say what I came here not knowing I needed to say.
“I also know I don’t feel less interested in Liv because I’m attracted to you.”
His eyes lift.
The air tightens.
I keep going, because if I stop now, I’ll turn it into a joke, and I don’t want to.
“And I don’t feel less attracted to you because I want her. It’s not either or for me.”
Halston’s mouth parts slightly.
A small reaction.
Almost nothing.
Enough to make my blood heat.
“Nor is it for me,” he agrees.
The fire shifts behind him. The snow keeps falling outside and disappearing against the window. I think about Liv in my sweatshirt, Liv arguing with James at the bar, Liv looking between us like she already knew this room existed and had been waiting for us to find the door.
Halston’s fingers move against the table.
“I don’t want to be tolerated by you,” he says.
The bluntness of it lands hard.
I meet it with my own.
“I don’t tolerate men I want.”
His eyes darken.
“Creed.”
“That is the truth,” I say. “You’re welcome.”
He laughs under his breath, but it doesn’t break the tension. If anything, it makes it worse, because now I know what his face looks like when control loses by one inch.
“I want you,” he says. “And I want her. And when I am with her, I think of you. When I am with you, I think of her. I have been trying to decide whether that makes me selfish.”
“It makes you honest.”
“It could make me dangerous.”
“To whom?”
“To both of you.”
I shake my head. “No.”
“You’re very certain.”
“On this, yes.”
His gaze holds mine.
“Why?”
“Because dangerous people don’t worry this much about hurting someone.”
He looks away first.
That feels like victory and mercy at the same time.
I let him have the window.
I let him look at the harbor, at the boats, at the snow dissolving before it can become anything permanent.
Then he says, quieter, “Liv asked me once if this was normal.”
I smile. “What did you tell her?”
“That we are, all three of us, well outside normal.”
“Good answer.”
“I also told her not to start measuring now.”
“Even better.”
His mouth curves. “I told her that when she is with you and thinks of me, she should not feel guilty. And when she is with me and thinks of you, I would be concerned if she didn’t.”
I hold very still.
He looks back at me.
“Because when we are with her,” he says, “we are thinking of each other too.”
“That is not disloyalty,” he says. “That is the first honest law of us. No one is loved away from the others. We only ever love each other closer.”
I don't speak for a moment.
I can’t.
Not because I don’t have words.
Because the right ones would change everything.
Halston seems to know.
He waits.
He is good at waiting when waiting is the only honorable thing left to do.
Finally, I say, “That sounded like something you’ve thought about.”
“It is.”
“How long?”
His eyes hold mine.
“Since the first time I met you at the bar.”
My breath leaves me in one slow pull.
“Since the bar?”
“Since you put your hand on the back of her stool and looked at me like you had not decided whether to flirt or fight, and then chose neither because the truth was stranger.”
“I never wanted to fight you.”
“I know.” His voice lowers. “That was the problem.”
I laugh quietly.
“Okay.”
The word is too small for what it agrees to. His gaze drops to my mouth.
Not for long.
Long enough.
The room changes.
His hand shifts on the table. Halston leans first.
Barely.
A question measured in inches.
I meet him halfway.
Our mouths touch.
For half a second, neither of us moves.
It is not tentative.
It is worse than tentative.
It is careful.
His lips are warm. Firm. Softer than the rest of him. My hand closes around the edge of the table because if I touch him too soon, I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep it as a kiss. He exhales against my mouth, and that small sound goes through me with an accuracy I'm not prepared to survive.
Fuck.
This is not curiosity.
This is not chemistry.
This is not the natural consequence of two men sitting too close in a hotel suite after champagne and honesty.
This is recognition.
My body knows him in the first real press of his mouth.
Not from before. Not from memory. From need.
From the sudden, brutal understanding that there are people you meet and people you arrive at, and Halston Saint Claire has been standing somewhere inside the future without either of us knowing how to name the road.
His hand comes up.
Stops near my jaw.
His fingers slide against my face, and the kiss opens.
Slow. Deep. Controlled until control becomes another form of wanting.
He tastes like champagne and restraint and the clean bite of something he has been holding back for too long.
I kiss him harder, not rough, not careless; just honest enough to make him breathe my name into my mouth without sound.
Creed.
He doesn’t say it.
I feel it.
My hand finds his wrist.
His pulse is fast beneath my thumb.
Halston pulls back first, but only enough to breathe. His forehead almost touches mine. His eyes stay closed for one second, then open, and whatever he sees on my face takes the last defense out of him.
“This is not only about Liv,” he says.
His voice is low.
Almost wrecked.
“No,” I say.
“It doesn't make her smaller.”
“No.”
“It makes the room larger.”
I let out a breath that almost becomes a laugh, because, of course, he would say it like that. Of course, he would find architecture in desire.
Then I kiss him again.
This time, he doesn’t wait.
His hand moves to the back of my neck, and mine slides to his waist, pulling him closer until the table edge presses between us, and the distance becomes an insult.
He makes a sound, quiet and contained, but it is there.
I hear it. I keep it. I kiss him like I have been trying not to want him since the bar and failing with better manners than most men manage.
There is heat in it.
There is hunger.
There is also Liv.
Not between us.
With us.
In the truth of it.
The fact that wanting him doesn't pull me away from her. It pulls me toward the place where all three of us have been slowly, stupidly, beautifully headed.
Halston’s mouth leaves mine.
He stays close.
We breathe the same air.
For a second, neither of us speaks.
Outside, the harbor lights blink through the wet snow. Inside, the fire keeps going, low and private, as if the room has decided to protect this before we understand what it is.
Halston’s thumb moves once against my jaw.
“What kind of night is tonight?” I ask, but this time my voice is different.
His mouth curves, faint and ruined.
“The first honest one,” he says.